Greetings and welcome to Blog Design Solutions. Given that you’re thumbing through this book, it’s probably fair to guess that either you want to set up a blog of your very own, or you already have one and want to make it stand out and look a bit, well, less boring.

Let’s face it: Unless you code your own blog from scratch (which, incidentally, is exactly what Chapter 7 of this book shows you how to do), you will have used a third-party blog engine of some kind to whip up your blog site. This has major advantages in that you don’t have to be a web-development expert to get a blog running, and it is a huge timesaver, but this is a double-edged sword: thousands of other people will have done exactly the same thing as you, so your blog will be far from individual in appearance, even if your postings have Oscar Wilde proportions of literary excellence.

But there’s a man who can help you. Eight men, in fact. And they wrote this book with one overriding goal in mind: to help you produce a blog that will stand out above the rest and attract more visitors to it, giving your hard-wrought prose the exposure it deserves. It doesn’t matter what level of technical know-how you have achieved; you’ll find something in here to improve your blog—whether it’s setting one up in the first place and giving it a bit of added sparkle, or taking your current blog and giving it an overhaul with some advanced CSS and template magic.